Poor Academic Performance from the Loss of Oxygen to the Brain, Coupled with Snoring

If your child is experiencing poor academic performance in school, you may be inclined to believe the complication is attributed to a learning complication or cognitive impairment. Often, when children exhibit complications associated with poor math, science, or even poor reading performance, parents and educators often feel it necessary to pursue academic testing into a potential learning complication that require tutoring.

The fact is that many children who perform poorly in school are simply suffering from a decline in academic performance due to a sleep disorder. When a sleep disorder is imposed upon a child, a condition known as hypoxia is quite common and results in extreme fatigue and poor cognitive and mental processing the following day.

Hypoxia is the medical term used to describe a medical condition in which a child may intermittently stop breathing or experience a decrease in oxygen flow to the brain. Repeated, over time, the complications of hypoxia will result in long term declines in academic performance.

To compound this problem, children who suffer from a sleeping disorder, that imposes snoring, may suffer an even greater complication in health and cognitive functioning. In studies, children who snored, even without hypoxic events, were noted to suffer the greatest complications in terms of academic performance due to the lack of oxygen saturation to the brain and resulting fatigue the following day.

To further study this complication, children who experience snoring, both with and without hypoxia, were tested in a variety of biological dynamics and then subjected to academic performance testing in math, science, reading and spelling. When compared to a control group of children, who did not snore or suffer from hypoxia, it was found that not only was the academic performance decreased in these children, but the children who snored also experienced, over time, a change and deficiency in their neurocognitive function. That is to say, these children showed extreme changes in their ability to process information in any mental capacity, even outside of the classroom.